Vitamin D Deficiency

Margot stood in the breakroom, peeling an orange with surgical precision. The citrus scent cut through the stale coffee air and fluorescent hum of the law firm at 11 PM. Her iphone buzzed against the counter—Marcus again. She'd stopped reading his messages three days ago.

"You're still here?" David appeared in the doorway, tie undone, that bulldog jowls thing happening with his exhaustion. He was the senior partner's golden boy, the one who'd somehow survived the merger massacre last spring.

"Just need to finish the bull valuation," she said, though they both knew she'd finished hours ago. Something about going home to her empty apartment felt worse than the fluorescent lights.

David leaned against the doorframe, watching her fingers separate the orange into perfect segments. "You know what Harris told me? 'She's got a vitamin deficiency.' Said you looked pale in the meeting."

Margot laughed, sharp and surprised. The firm's managing partner had reduced her months of increasingly visible despair—her missed deadlines, her hollowed-out eyes, her inability to care about whether a tech startup worth three billion was actually worth anything—to a lack of sunlight and supplements.

"I'm fine," she said, but her voice cracked. David's dog had died last month. He'd told her in the elevator, tears streaming down his face while discussing Q4 projections. There was something about that rawness that had made her want to confess everything—that she hadn't felt like herself since the miscarriage, that Marcus's patience was wearing thin, that she'd started forgetting to eat.

Instead she'd nodded and said, "I'm sorry for your loss," like a human resources training video.

Now David reached out and took one of the orange segments from her hand. Their fingers brushed—brief, electric, terrible. For a moment she saw the same exhaustion in his eyes that she felt in her own bones. The same question: what are we doing here? What are any of us doing?

"Harris is an idiot," David said, and walked away.

Margot's iphone lit up again. Marcus: "I made dinner. Come home when you can."

She ate the rest of the orange one segment at a time, letting the juice sting the small cuts on her fingers, and finally typed back: "On my way."